Once independence was won, the colonial elites who inserted themselves to take control of what had been a self-organized rebellion turned their attention to securing their hold on the institutions of government. The human rights that had been carefully delineated in the earlier Declaration of Colonial Rights, and the principle that all men are born equal and enjoy a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness so elegantly articulated in the Declaration of Independence, fell by the wayside. The focus shifted to securing the interests of industrialists, bankers, and slave-owning plantation owners and assuring that the powers of government would remain in the hands of white men of means. Empire morphed once again into a new form but remained true to the essential organizing principle of domination. What the founders brought forth is best described as a constitutional plutocracy with an agenda of imperial expansion.
Most every American will readily acknowledge that the United States is a superpower. To acknowledge that we are an imperial power feels less comfortable, as it contradicts our national self-concept as a democratic nation and a global beacon of freedom. The facts of our history, however, make it painfully clear that imperial expansion to dominate other peoples and appropriate their resources has been integral to our nation’s domestic and foreign policy throughout our history. It is the classic imperial solution to the problem of domestic tensions resulting from the injustice of an extreme division of society between people who own and people who work.
Our forebears who settled the narrow bit of land along the east coast of North America took the land by force and deceit from its indigenous inhabitants. They imported slaves forcibly abducted from Africa to work the land. When they found that land insufficient to their needs, they embarked on an imperial westward expansion to appropriate by force all of the Native and Mexican lands between themselves and the 200far distant Pacific Ocean, displacing or killing the original inhabitants as they went.
Reaching out beyond our own borders, we converted cooperative dictatorships into client states by giving their ruling classes a choice of aligning themselves with our economic and political interests and sharing in the booty or being eliminated by military force. Following World War II, when the classic forms of colonial rule became unacceptable, we turned to international debt as our favored instrument for imperial control and later to trade agreements that opened foreign economies to direct ownership and control by transnational corporations.
As our history makes clear, democracy is not a gift granted by benevolent power holders. Those to whom it has been denied achieve it only through organization and sustained struggle.
201
CHAPTER 12
Struggle for Justice
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”1
Martin Luther King Jr.
Humans commonly confine to the realm of the unconscious those aspects of the self that the conscious mind denies because they challenge a favored self-image. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung referred to these denied aspects of the self as the shadow. Actualizing the full potential of the self requires acknowledging and healing the pain underlying the denial.
It is much the same for nations as for individuals. We Americans have been inclined to confine both the stories of U.S. imperial expansion and the stories of the repression of nonwhites, women, and working-class people within our own borders to a collective unconscious as too painfully contrary to our national self-concept to acknowledge. It is not only a denial of the injustice in which we are complicit but also a denial of the reality of Empire and the troubling truth that our nation is not—and never has been—a democracy. To achieve the democracy that is central to our national self-image we must first acknowledge that we have never had it.
We are slowly making progress as a nation toward achieving liberty and justice for all only through the long and difficult struggles of the excluded. To know these struggles is to appreciate both the progress achieved and the magnitude of the challenge that remains.
WORDS THAT REFUSE TO DIE
The U.S. Constitution fell far short of securing for all the promise of the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet the bold words of the Declaration of Independence refused to die and continue to this day to inspire those who would make the promise a reality.
202 The Declaration said, “All men are created equal.” There was nothing about only white men or men of property. If all men, why not all women? Such questions inspired a series of struggles, each of which made historic contributions to advancing the United States and the world on the path to the mature democracy of Earth Community—a journey that remains to this day far from complete.
Abolishing Slavery
Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and David Walker were among the free blacks who campaigned openly, at the risk of their lives and freedom, to mobilize resistance against the institution of slavery.2 Brave white allies of a mature democratic consciousness shared their outrage and joined in the struggle. The Quakers at Germantown, Pennsylvania, condemned slavery as early as 1688. Boston Puritan Samuel Sewall published America’s first abolitionist tract, The Selling of Joseph, in 1700. William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in 1831, a newspaper dedicated to rallying public support for abolition. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1851, was one of history’s most influential books.3 In the end, it took the Civil War to bring an end to legally sanctioned slavery in the United States and to grant black men full citizenship and the right to vote—a legal recognition of their humanity that continued to be denied to women of any race.
Blacks were technically free, but whites owned the land and controlled the jobs on which blacks depended for survival. Continuing the imperial pattern, the rights of capital continued to trump the rights of labor as the moneylenders stepped in for the kill. Blatantly unfair sharecropper arrangements forced blacks into debts that became an instrument of bondage only one step removed from an outright return to slavery.4
Oppression and terror prevailed until the civil rights movement of the latter half of the twentieth century achieved an important, but still partial, cultural transformation in race relationships and backed it with legal sanctions against those who overtly denied African Americans their basic civil rights.
Securing Civil Rights for People of Color
The modern civil rights movement was born in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks, a middle-aged African American seamstress and 203longtime activist leader with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white patron. The success of the subsequent bus boycott led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. unleashed a sense of pride and possibility in black communities across the country, inspiring wave after wave of protest—and often deadly white reprisals. As awareness of the injustices of segregation spread, thousands of whites were inspired to join blacks in their struggle. The resulting political pressures resulted in the omnibus Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited “discrimination by race, color, sex, religion, or national origin in voter registration, employment, public education, and public accommodations.”5
White backlash became increasingly deadly, causing many black leaders to question whether peaceful integration into the mainstream of society was possible or even desirable. Black anger found expression in increasingly violent inner-city rebellions, including the August 1965 Watts rebellion, in which thirty-four people were killed, nearly a thousand injured, and more than four thousand arrested. King’s valiant calls for nonviolence fell on increasingly deaf ears, and by the time of his assassination on April 4, 1968, the movement was beginning to stall as the FBI became increasingly aggressive in infiltrating, disrupting, and discrediting major civil rights groups.6
Within the broad limits permitted by the prevailing institutions an
d culture of Empire, the civil rights movement transformed the self-concept of African Americans, brought the issue of race relations to the fore of the national consciousness, and removed many of the more overt manifestations of racial discrimination. As with the American Revolution itself, the impetus for change came from an assertion of rights by the oppressed.
Although we remain far from realizing King’s dream of a free and equal multiracial society, the accomplishments of the civil rights movement were a major step toward the realization of that democratic ideal. Furthermore, it inspired the many progressive movements that fol-lowed—giving impetus to a still ongoing cultural turning toward the partnership relations of Earth Community.
Equality for Women
The movement for equal rights for women has deep roots in the movement to abolish slavery based on race. Early on, a group of visionary 204women concluded that eliminating race-based slavery was a necessary first step toward eliminating gender-based slavery. Thus when, in February of 1828, Angelina Grimké became the first woman to address a legislative body in the United States, it was to present to the Massachusetts General Court an antislavery petition signed by twenty thousand women.7
A critical turning point in feminist activism occurred in 1840, when the male majority at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London barred women from participating in the proceedings. Feminist antislavery crusaders Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were so infuriated that they turned their attention to a direct demand for women’s rights. Stanton organized the first American Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848, which issued its own Declaration of Independence, beginning with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.”8
In 1920, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment finally guaranteed female suffrage in the United States. Unfortunately, however, it no more guaranteed full dignity for women than early Constitutional Amendments had guaranteed it for black men.9
A second wave of feminism emerged in the 1960s, stirred by Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, and the experience of activist women in the civil rights and other liberation movements of the time. Friedan awakened a new consciousness of the extent to which women’s confining roles were socially constructed by men to secure their dominant position and by advertisers engaged in assuring demand for the often frivolous products of a growing economy. The result of the second wave of feminism was a cultural revolution that continues to transform the relationships between men and women and to challenge the underlying social structures of sexism worldwide.
Citizenship for the Original Citizens
One of the darkest of all the dark chapters of U.S. imperial history concerns the fate of the Native Americans against whom the European American settlers waged a campaign of genocide to expropriate their lands and destroy their cultures. Massive waves of European immigration fueled an explosive population growth in the new nation, which rose from an estimated 4 million people in 1790 to 31 million in 1860. Territorial expansion proceeded apace. The new nation occupied a land 205area of 865,000 square miles in 1790. When the westward expansion to the Pacific was completed in 1853, the continental United States occupied 3 million square miles.10 What was for the European immigrants an experience of liberty, expansion, prosperity, and opportunity was for the Native Americans who stood in their path an experience of tyranny, contraction, poverty, and confinement.
Initially the Native Americans—steeped in the values and ways of Community—sought accommodation with those they had at first greeted as their honored guests. Steeped in the values and ways of Empire, the guests responded with ruthless duplicity. It was the endlessly repeated story of the landing of Columbus.
As the United States encroached ever deeper into Native lands in the relentless drive to the West, Native resistance grew, but it was ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the immigration and the superior firepower of the U.S. military. Reduced to a tenth of their number from the days when the intrusions began, those Native peoples who remained were confined to reservations on isolated fragments of land the Europeans considered to be of little or no value. Even then, the press to appropriate what remained of Indian lands and to assimilate the remaining indigenous population into the European culture continued. In the period between 1946 and 1960, Indian tribes lost an additional 3.3 million acres of land.11
Many of the Native American cultures those of European descent sought to destroy gave far greater expression to the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, democracy, and human dignity than any European culture before or since. Many Native peoples remain to this day repositories of the ancient wisdom of those who lived in Community, and they retain a memory of human possibilities that Empire denies. Those whose special status rests on the ruthless injustice of Empire have good reason to consider that memory a threat to their privilege.
It was not until 1924 that Native Americans won through their struggles an act of Congress granting them full and automatic citizenship in the land that was once their own. In 1978, the U.S. Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, guaranteeing the right of Native Americans to practice their traditional religions.12 Finally, citizenship was restored to the original citizens of North America who in a more just world would have been the ones to decide who among the visiting Europeans were qualified to become citizens of the continent’s preexisting First Nations and on what conditions. 206
STRUGGLES OF THE MIDDLE AND WORKING CLASSES
Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, and Adam Smith all shared an appreciation for the importance to a stable and democratic society of a strong middle class composed of independent farmers and artisans who owned the instruments of their production. A strong middle-class ownership society in which the same people who own the productive assets also provide the labor that makes the assets productive is the antithesis of Empire and an essential foundation of Earth Community.
In the immediate pre- and post-Revolution periods, most free white males made their living as independent farmers, merchants, and artisans of modest but adequate means. They prepared the way for the American Revolution, demanded that the Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution, and kept watch on the issuance of corporate charters. They presented a threat to the imperial designs of the domestic ruling class, which rallied to reduce the upstarts to serfdom.
Eroding the Middle Class
As population and markets grew, the merchant capitalists of New England who had built their fleets and fortunes through privateering, slaving, and war profiteering capitalized on growing demand for manufactured goods by importing cheap goods from England to undersell the independent local craftsmen and drive them out of business. Forced into the wage labor force, these artisans had no choice but to sell their labor to the owners of larger aggregations of capital on whatever terms the owners offered.
Growing numbers of white farmers in the Northeast suffered a similar fate as they were driven out of family farming by land shortages, debt, and competition from midwestern agriculture. Westward expansion provided a safety valve for the displaced until the closing of the western land frontier around 1860. As noted in chapter 11, however, the bankers followed and the farmers soon found themselves once again captive to a system that drove them to mortgage their lands to secure debts they had no means to repay.13 The resulting frustrations brought forth the rapid growth in the 1890s of an agrarian populist movement that took aim at the deeper structural causes of economic injustice and for a time became a potent rural force. Led primarily by land-owning family farmers, it was unable to bridge the divide between whites and 207blacks or between landowning farmers and landless farm workers. Its briefly successful but short-lived People’s Party was absorbed into the Democratic Party, and the movement disappeared.14
The displaced who were not attracted to homesteading sought work in mines, factories, and construction, where they were commonly required to work twelve- to fourteen-hour days, six days a week, w
ith Sunday off to attend church. Women who lacked the support of a husband worked as domestics or in textile factories. Domestics had virtually no time to themselves. Workers of either sex had few if any rights, and bosses continually drove them to produce more for less pay.15 The greater the monopolization of productive assets by the money people, the fewer the options available to working people, and the greater the power advantage of the owners of capital—thus deepening the classic asymmetrical power relationship of Empire.
The recourse was the same as the recourse against British rule: to organize. The first to do so were white craftsmen, those who had the most resources and options and retained a foothold in the middle class.
In 1827 a number of craft unions in Philadelphia formed the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations. Similar federations formed in thirteen cities from 1833 through 1836, coordinating their efforts through the National Trades Union founded in 1834. They sponsored labor newspapers, supported strikes, organized other workers, and lobbied for reforms that included improving public education, eliminating compulsory militia musters, and repealing legal restrictions on the formation of labor unions. Their defining cause was a demand to reduce the workday to ten hours.16
The Great Turning Page 25